Personal Phone calls?

co350 1 post—-“And to jon I can give you a clear picture of how to manage the situation. We as officers should be given the same rights as any other employee that can make a outside call at will. Management trust us to watch convicted felons 8-16 hours at a time yet you dont trust us to place phone calls. Grow up.”-———

The “same rights…” You must think that having the opportunity to make an outside call while you are on work is a right…Further, based on your tone and tenor, you must think this is some really big deal and that all the administration does at your facility is sit on their collective butts all day at work making outside phone calls just because they can…!?!?!?

Cellphones are not allowed in our Centres at all.Officials have the option of getting a personal pin and make phonecalls from landlines using their pins the phone account is deducted from their salaries each month.Officials have lost their cellphones inside the Centres already in the past therefore the no cellphone policy was introduced.

In Arizona you can lose your job for bringing a cell on the unit. I’m a Sergeant and here if an Officer needs to make a persolan call they call a supervisor who calls complex to authorize the call and away they go.On the otherhand our Deputy Wardens carry blackberrys at all times and Investigators are authorized to bring cell phones on the unit but thats it.

Well if it wasnt for the poor reception due to the cement, bars, wires, and signal blocking systems, i still wouldnt bring a cell phone in.
For starters and probably the most important reason is because all my contact info, family pictures, calanders, and so on are contained on my phone….so if my phone is stolen/lost the inmate now knows almost everyhthing about me.
Anyone who can introduce me to an inmate who wouldnt use the phone for illigal activities please introduce us.
They can call and harrass their victim, run their criminal enterprise from their cell, set up “hits” on enemies, and so on.
Its a serious threat to safety. NO cell phones period!

And don’t forget the DING at the end of the line. How about carbon paper,and making copies where you had to put the original on a drum and crank it. Oh the memories of moving up in the world with my Commodore 64 then up grading to the 128 a few years later. Wow we can go on and on but this is depressing me about how old I am.

Oh, jeez, the manual typewriter. How could I have forgotten that? You simply had to have experienced it to understand. Hitting two or three keys at the same time would make them lock up. Didn’t have “white out” and had to use an erasure (rubbing too hard put a hole in the paper). Changing the ribbon in the middle of a report meant ink on your fingers and THAT meant smudges on every page you touched. Finishing a ten page report and realizing something HAD to be on page three. Retyping page three. Now the flow of information to page four is changed, with the final result being that the entire thing had to be retyped. I quickly learned to write my reports long hand. The entire thing was full of scratch outs, scribbles, arrows to different paragraphs, and was unreadable to anyone but me. Old movies showing someone typing with a pile of crumpled paper all over the room isn’t made up. Come to think of it, when I had to answer a call and leave the report in the typewrite… unfinished… someone would invariably take my report out of the typewriter to do their own report. It was an art to put my report back in that typewriter and get the page lined up so’s I could finish it. And a different typewriter would often mean different fonts.

“Daggum! HOWDID WE EVER DO IT “BACK THEN” in them olden days?” Totally fricking true. LOL!

When I started here at the Sheriff’s Office, we kept paper logs. Our control board was a board with cup hooks were we hung mosaic tiles with the inmates names on them, color coded for classification… Used typewriters for our reports, typed by the post 1 admin officer. Now we have computers at every post…WITHINTERNETACCESS. Electronic logs, our own “secure” intra-net.

At work we’re attached to a phone, and the last thing I would want is a cell phone to keep track of. At home it isn’t so bad, but if the phone rings at work, work is involved. And it rings off the hook. Kinda like working for a Sheriff’s Office or Police Department. Nobody calls unless they want something.

And at work we live by the clock. In a sense we’re paid to watch the clock because everything we do is time sensitive. Count the inmates at a specific time. Feed them at a specific time. Send them to pill call at a specific time. Send them to work at a specific time. Call Control every hour on the hour in the evenings and on midnight shift. Log specific times we do security rounds. Log specific times thus and such happened. Sometimes I even get a phone call from the Shift Commander wanting to know what time something was logged two or three days ago.

Shakey, you gave me a good belly laugh about the CB radio. When I went into the Army in ‘72 CB’s were rare. When I came home in ‘76 EVERYBODY had one. I felt like I was so far behind in technology that I’d never catch up. Didn’t understand the lingo. Didn’t understand buying a license to transmit. And I’d never heard of Gene Tracy (some of you will understand that and some won’t… google him).

And now that I’ve started down Memory Lane….. when guys were transferred to Europe with their families, and the theme song to the tee vee show “Happy Days” came on the radio, their kids would run through the house yelling and looking for the tee vee so they could watch that show. I didn’t know what was going on with that, either.

Using a radio in the patrol car or transport van meant keying the mic for a couple of seconds so the tubes would warm up enough to transmit. And there were a lot more blind spots than there are today, with some of those blind spots in the parking lot. Years later, when cell phones came out, they were about the size of a brick and sometimes worked just as good as one. And only the very biggest of the big shots had access to them.

And today a cell phone is the only thing a guy will brag about having that’s smaller than anyone elses.

I think we should be able to bring our laptops in also, that way if they can’t reach me by Radio, PA, Reg phone,Cell phone or yard officer’s, they can then e-mail me. Then if they still can’t get ahold of me, they should just call my house, because apparently I’m not where I supposed to be, doing what I’m supposed to be doing, so I must be home.

We somehow can’t live without cell phones these days.

I remember back in the day, if you wanted to talk to someone from your car, you used a CB. thats a big 10-4 good buddy…lol

First of all I do not feel that Officers or staff should not be able to carry cellular phones. At my facility which is owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America the policy is as follows: The only staff that is allowed to carry cellular telephones is ADO staff (Warden, AW, Chief of Secuiry) QA, Contract Monitors, K9, and Corporate Staff visiting the facility. As far as personal phone calls at my facility the capts or lt approves the personal phone call before transfer.

Pamela, There is no day-to-day need in the typical correctional institution for cell phones that cannot be addressed with other means of communication. Inmates DO NOT have ANY need for a cell phone, that is to say that I cannnot think of one situation where there is a true need for an inmate to have one. Granted, in a terrorist type attack, officers having cell phones may be needed, but even then, most institutions have digital radios now.
Please don’t take my response as an attack. If you can share a situation where a cell phone would be necessary, please share it.

In my opinion. A cell phone is neccassary. I have never worked for the prison system. But. it just seems to be a safety issue. Correctional officers must be able to contact other officers and other officials thru out the entire unit at all times. its logic. common sense. your working in a facility with alot of dangerous individuals with a nothing to lose attitude. and there are other individuals are just serving shorter sentences just doing there time the best they can. Correctional officers need every tool available to do the job their hired for. theres gonna be a few bad apples of course. its up to the proper officials to do the gardening. weed out the bad ones. My son is in Anamosa Iowa state prison. he screwed up. he made a bad decision. hes paying for it. I would like to believe that there are good hard working. honest employees being hired as correctional officers in our prison system. people on the outside can see where making a bad decision can get you. cell phones today can save lives of officers and inmates just doing there sentenced time.

In my opinion. A cell phone is neccassary. I have never worked for the prison system. But. it just seems to be a safety issue. Correctional officers must be able to contact other officers and other officials thru out the entire unit at all times. its logic. common sense. your working in a facility with alot of dangerous individuals with a nothing to lose attitude. and there are other individuals are just serving shorter sentences just doing there time the best they can. Correctional officers need every tool available to do the job their hired for. theres gonna be a few bad apples of course. its up to the proper officials to do the gardening. weed out the bad ones. My son is in Anamosa Iowa state prison. he screwed up. he made a bad decision. hes paying for it. I would like to believe that there are good hard working. honest employees being hired as correctional officers in our prison system. people on the outside can see where making a bad decision can get you. cell phones today can save lives of officers and inmates just doing there sentenced time.

This is a subject that does depend on security level of your facility.I have read articles that my state goverment is looking at signal blocking the area around our medium and max facilities. When this happens carring a cell phone inside becomes mute. I do agree with riggsville that dealing with the officers that abuse the use of phone calls should be on an as needed bases not take away the use of phones for all. Other issues of safety can be brought up,not being able to call outside help from one housing unit when the phones in the admit building goes down. Well the basic point is there will always be bad staff and officers.Do your best to make sure everone goes home safely everyday!

Point well taken, Mick. Oh, we have had our share of scumbags. I have to wonder, were they dirty from the ourset and our hiring proceedure failed? Or, were they “clean” when hired and then the job changed them. Personally, I think it is a character flaw. We had a sworn police officer that killed an innocent store owner for $50,000. Strangled him in the back of his police car and drove around with him dead in the back seat until he could dump the body in a ditch about 3 hours later. That is NOT, could NOT, have ever been someone that had an “Officer’s Heart”. They had to be very good at being a chameleon, for a while at least. But again…
Point Well Taken. We have to always be on the vigil.

riggsville. Just one thing you said “I have been blessed to not have had to work personally with them”. All I will say is that you know of.
I trained and worked along side a guy for 8 years never suspecting him of being a lying drug dealing scumbag. None of us that worked with him did. It was only after he was arrested that we found out the extent of his treachery. Last week he got 4 yrs. And we heard today that another piece of filth was arrested on his way into another Prison with over $15000 of Heroin.
So you may think you have never worked with a dirty Officer but if you are in the Job long enough may have without even knowing it.